I have been using Mint for about a year now, and I love it, it's amazing and perfect for someone who just wants to get the job done.

I want to know how people fork Desktop Environments on Linux. Do they just modify the source code? What was the process behind the making of Cinnamon?Also, I am very good in C++, so how hard and educating would it be for me to fork something like KDE?

I don't know how much about how did they do Cinnamon or MATE, but I guess that the forking process was basically compiling GNOME and then just customize and tweak it, for finally package it and create a PPA.But I don't know, I just guessed it

That's what I thought happened, so I downloaded the KDE source...and arrgghh! It's so confusing! There are so many folders all over the place and you don't really know what does what unless you study it for a while...